-Transcript-
00:28 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to Christmas service here.
00:32 Welcome to the service that you may be seeing after Christmas or hearing after Christmas, but this is our Christmas message. I’m so glad you could join me here today. God bless you.
00:43 God bless your family. From behalf of all of our family, it’s extra quiet in the house because they’re not here right now, but I hope you’re having a wonderful Christmas, a wonderful holiday season. Amen.
00:55 And as we go through Christmas, it’s important to keep Christ in Christmas. We used to have a sign in our front yard, our old house that said, keep Christ in Christmas. And that’s very important because it’s so busy this time of year.
01:12 There’s so much going on that we need to remember to keep Christ in Christmas, not just keep Christ in Christmas as in remembering Jesus, but adoring Jesus, adoring Jesus.
01:29 And my goal here today is to help you to adore Jesus. You know, if there was a title to this message, it would be adoration.
01:32 Who can put into words the God of the heavens? Who can accurately paint the picture of a God so loving and kind? Who can look at a God so holy?
01:45 God is beyond words and God’s love is beyond our vocabularies, beyond my vocabulary, beyond every letter in the alphabet, every word in the dictionary.
01:59 He’s beyond it. You know, we can say words like love and beauty and all of these things, and we do our best.
02:05 I’m going to do my best today. But I wanted to start by just explaining that as you come to know the Lord, I promise you, you will come to know a God that is beyond words in terms of love, in terms of holiness, in terms of steadfast loyalty. There is no God like Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.
02:25 And as we look at Christ’s Mass, we look at Christmas, we look at the birth of a Savior, I want you to know that His love is as real today as it’s ever been. Oh, you say, well, the Bible was written thousands of years ago and preachers have come and gone and so forth.
02:42 Look, He’s alive and well, amen. And I believe we are in the end times, the last days, and He wants you to know that He loves you so much.
02:50 He loves you so much that He died for you, amen? So we’re going to do our best today to see God as He is, a wonderful, lovely, perfect Creator God with a plan that is life to those that are living in this fallen and dead world. Jesus is life.
03:08 And I mentioned the word adoration.
03:14 You know, you’ll hear the song, Come, Let Us Adore Him. Adoration, the definition literally means deep love and respect. Deep love and respect.
03:24 I looked in another dictionary that I like to use, I call it the KJV dictionary, I don’t know what it’s called, but it was written a long time ago and it uses a lot of Bible words, okay?
03:27 And adoration is written about as an attitude of worship characterized by love and reverence towards God. So a deep love and respect. You know, our church is called Heartland Community Baptist Church.
03:43 Our ministry, the arm of the church as the ministry is called Heartland Ministries. And I’ve been preaching about the heart. Ask our group here all year, it seems like, maybe even for a few years, I’ve been preaching about the heart and talking about how the heart is kind of the deepest part of us.
04:02 And you can read in Romans 10, how we believe with the heart and we confess with the mouth. And so we see adoration being a deep love and respect.
04:03 That’s a heart thing, right? Many people may say, okay, I understand Christians.
04:19 I understand Christ as the Messiah. And I understand that this is when he was born. You can intellectually understand with your mind, but do you understand with your heart?
04:28 Do you understand with your heart? Worship the idea to adore, to pay divine honors to, reverence and supreme respect and veneration.
04:37 And you know, I don’t throw around the word worship very lightly. I almost never use the word worship.
04:44 And I think the reason why is because we, you know, our gathering together should kind of show forth worship rather than just saying, oh, let’s worship everybody, snap, snap, let’s go ahead and worship.
05:01 Well, it’s deeper than that. It’s deeper than an emotion. It’s deeper than just a song coming on or a feeling coming on that could come and go.
05:11 A deep love and respect is one that is always there. You think of God, the father, and you think of that love you have for your father, maybe your earthly father or your grandfather, whoever it may be. It’s a deep love.
05:22 It’s not fleeting. It’s not changing. And that’s what our worship should be.
05:27 It should be a deep love informed by God’s word of the Bible, informed by what’s in the Bible. And I have a really interesting text verse for you today. The Lord gave me this.
05:37 It’s really interesting. John 3:1-2, there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. The same came to Jesus by night and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher.
05:49 Come from God, for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him. And so that’s our text verse today. You have Nicodemus.
05:59 He is not just a Jew. He is not just any Jew. He is a ruler of the Jews.
06:04 And he’s coming to Jesus by night in what? Reverence, in supreme respect. Rabbi, with a capital R, meaning teacher. It’s a word of respect.
06:13 It’s a compliment. Amen. It might be like someone coming up to you saying professor, right? Or doctor, okay? It’s a compliment saying, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher.
06:22 Come from God. Nicodemus himself, this respected high level authority is coming to Jesus by night and saying, we know you’re from God. I know you’re from God.
06:35 Nobody can do the miracles that you’ve done. And you see, that is worship in itself. That is reverence in itself.
06:40 And I think the picture here out of John 3, where we have John 3:16, probably the most famous verse in the Bible, amen, the picture here is that we have somebody coming to Jesus in reverence and respect and inquiring of him.
06:56 And that for us should be an example and say, you know what? If we reverence Jesus, if we want to adore Jesus, and we truly want to have adoration towards Jesus, we need to kind of inquire of him.
07:07 We need to go to him, amen? We need to see who this Jesus is.
07:14 That’s what Nicodemus was doing. He was saying, look, I need to know who you are. And that was brave.
07:21 I mean, you get into why he was coming at night. Maybe he couldn’t be seen during the day. Maybe he would have been kicked off of the Sanhedrin, which was like the Supreme Court.
07:27 Maybe he would have been demoted, or maybe he would have been punished. He went by night. He went in secret.
07:31 But he still went, and he said, I need to know who you are, you know? And Jesus even kind of chides him a little bit later on in John 3, saying, look, you’re a ruler of the Jews, and you don’t know these basic things, amen.
07:41 Because he couldn’t understand how we have to be born again. So we’re going to look here today, and we’re going to take that form of adoration that God would have us to take, to look at Jesus Christ.
07:51 Oh, man, the Son of God, amen, our Savior and Lord, amen, so much more than a postcard, so much more than just an ornament, so much more than just a scene at a courthouse or on a park lawn or something.
08:06 He’s so much more than that, amen. You know, the world here is all yoked up and all these material things. Jesus is so much more than that. He’s so much more than that.
08:16 When we look at Jesus, it should be the contrast. That should be the contrast. Jesus Christ should be the contrast to the material Christmas that we see here, not the compliment, not the little bit of extra, not that nice little thing, amen. But Jesus Christ should be the contrast, should be the true meaning of the season.
08:39 So we are going to get to know Jesus. We’re going to look at how we can adore him specifically at his birth. Adore him at his earthly ministry, his suffering here on earth, and adore his place above all names in heaven.
08:54 So we’re going to kind of look at his beginning and the middle part there and the eternal end where he is alive and well in heaven today.
09:01 But let’s start at his birth, Philippians 2:6-8, who being in the form of God thought it not robbery to be equal with God. That means that Jesus is in the form of God.
09:12 He’s not robbing God by saying he’s God, he is God. Verse 7, but he made himself of no reputation and took upon him the form of a servant and was made in the likeness of men, a form of a servant.
09:26 And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
09:31 We’re going to get to that in a bit. His coming to earth as a lowly servant was so different than what everyone was expected.
09:39 I recently preached on Isaiah 53 and about this root, the root coming out of dry ground and I was preaching on this idea of dry ground being, it wasn’t fertile ground.
09:51 There wasn’t a big revival going on when Jesus was born. It wasn’t like everybody was looking for Jesus to come in the way that he came, to arrive on earth in the way that he arrived. His coming to earth as a lowly servant.
10:04 He was born of everyday people, Joseph and Mary. You know what they were doing? Does anyone know what they were doing in Bethlehem? You know, we always hear he’s born in Bethlehem.
10:14 What were they doing in Bethlehem? Luke 2:4- 5.And Joseph also went up from Galilee out of the city of Nazareth into Judea under the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David to be taxed with Mary, his espoused wife, being great with child.
10:32 So David with Mary is going to pay taxes. Look, if you talk about being born of ordinary individuals, how about the people just going to pay their taxes, like literally going to pay your taxes?
10:46 You know, that is about the most ordinary thing I can think of people doing. And that is our Savior.
10:54 That is the foundation of our Savior’s birth. That is why they were there in Bethlehem. And yet we don’t hear that spoken about a lot.
11:03 Well, get this. Why am I bringing this up? Because it’s humble beginnings. It was God’s choice to send Himself in the form of His Son, Jesus Christ, God in the flesh.
11:15 You can think of God in three parts. This is called the Holy Trinity, the three-in-one Godhead, the fullness of God, God the Father, up there in the third heaven, God the Son, Jesus Christ, and God the Holy Spirit, the Holy Ghost. That’s who we get.
11:30 It’s a He, and we get Him when we get saved, amen? And so, God the Father sends the Son, not on golden chariots, not on these big elaborate, you know, I was thinking like parades, right, you think of these big parades for the military folks out there, or the politicians, or so forth, not on these big motorcades, or whatever we call the chariot-acade, not all those things.
11:56 He sent Jesus Christ to a manger in Bethlehem during tax season, so that He could be born there, amen. I was born on New Year’s Day. I know all about it.
12:05 I’m born, and then like a week later, oh, we got to do our taxes. You know, it’s part of life, but it shows the humility in which the Lord was born.
12:14 Luke 2:7, and she brought, this is Mary, and she brought forth her firstborn son, wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn.
12:25 And I’ve heard it preached that was there really no room for them in the inn, or did they not have the resources? If the richest person, if Nicodemus, for example, were to show up in that town, would there be room for him in the inn?
12:40 Maybe there’d be another guest home for him to stay in, or surely someone would have a place for them to stay. But Jesus Himself, with Joseph and Mary just going there to pay taxes, they’re there in the manger, amen.
12:47 You know, we should adore His humble beginnings. We should adore that God the Father sent God the Son in His wisdom to be born in such an ordinary situation.
13:02 Because that helps us to see, and again, this is lost a lot of times in the pageantry of Christmas. That helps us to see that God desires all to be saved, and that truly this message is for everyday people. It is for ordinary people.
13:19 It’s for people that can relate to not having a place to stay, not having what they need, amen. Not having, or having to go to pay taxes. You know, it wasn’t like they could have their servant go. They had to go and pay taxes.
13:29 Well, we are running out of time here today, but don’t worry, we’re just getting warmed up here talking about the lowly life of Jesus, the adoring of Jesus through Him condescending Himself down to man to save us, amen.
13:46 And this is the first part of a three-part series on adoration, our Christmas message. And I know you’re saying, Brother Clark, it’s after Christmas. Hey, look, we should adore Jesus every day.
13:58 That’s why I’m playing it now, because you know what? We should be preaching this spring, summer, fall, winter, all the time.
14:04 And just to adore Jesus and to focus on Him and who He is, it should be our life’s calling here today. And so I thank you for listening today.
14:10 If you want to hear the whole message, you can visit us on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash KJV Cafe, or on YouTube, search up KJV Cafe. And you can listen to the whole message, Adoration at one time.
14:23 If not, tune in next time. Take care. God bless. Again, thank you for joining us, and amen.